


for the better

by enchantingoats



Series: snk scenes - bittersweet edition [3]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, F/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Sad, Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan Manga Spoilers, Violence, eren deserves better in this one too, mikasa deserves better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:34:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29095074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enchantingoats/pseuds/enchantingoats
Summary: He hates hearing her cry. Hates that the little gasps she’s making are laden with the wrong sort of feelings, and that despite all their time together, she still isn’t honest about how much pain he’s causing her.
Relationships: Mikasa Ackerman & Armin Arlert & Eren Yeager, Mikasa Ackerman & Eren Yeager, Mikasa Ackerman/Eren Yeager
Series: snk scenes - bittersweet edition [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2128788
Comments: 3
Kudos: 33





	for the better

He hates hearing her cry. Hates that the little gasps she’s making are laden with the wrong sort of feelings, and that despite all their time together, she still isn’t honest about how much pain he’s causing her. 

He knows the clues to the depth of her pain are in her face. That’s where they always are, but he can’t bring himself to look at her either. To see what he’s done, a myriad of miserable micro-expressions that meld and might reach the heart that he’d already ripped out months ago. 

Of course she’s beautiful even then, in the untouchable way she always is; ethereal even in battle. Tears on women as fearsome as her are little more than a reminder that their compassion for lesser beings is their only undoing.

That her attachment to him is her only weakness. Broken so he can finish his own role in what is yet to come, but more, to liberate her to finish hers. 

“A slave,” Mikasa replies, and it is with an ire he had not felt before directed towards him. Her eyes are hooded, honing in on him with the lethality of her predecessors. Whatever resentment he had hoped would fester in her heart seemed to have taken root. 

Her first kick is restrained, but he lets himself feel the motion deep within his core, lets the pain radiate through nerve and bone. He’ll have to hit back eventually, if only to remind them both that the vehemence in his tone is real, that his words are real, that he hates her with the little soul he has left. 

“You don’t deserve her,” his once friend says, and Armin departs quickly and silently. To leave is to acknowledge that Eren is beyond salvation, that there is only so far that Armin can go for him.

Armin had died to spit in the face of that truth once. The phantom smell of acrid burning flesh still stings the roof of his mouth.

Mikasa punches him again.

The scar on her cheek has faded over the years, the raised edge dissipating into unmarred cheekbone, and that is the place he strikes. It is a reminder that he has swung before, and from the brief flicker in her eyes, he knows she remembers it too.

This time she does not dodge his blow.

Instead she just stops. Unwraps the scarf and folds it tenderly along well worn creases, tabled with the rest of their history together. The door click is imperceptible. 

Red and red and red is all he sees when he tramples the bodies of the dead.

  


* * *

  


“I love you,” she whispers.

He nods. Her eyes are beautiful, and they are the last he sees of their cruel world.

**Author's Note:**

> there is some great fan art of this already, but I don’t think the fight would have been as cleanly her victory. anyway, the same annotation on “ruminations” but I would read that after this one if interested. I would have put a break in this piece and kept them together, but it was a really abrupt change of tone/pace imo.


End file.
